Language and the institutional dynamics of the Court of Justice of the European Communities: lawyer-linguists and the production of a multilingual jurisprudence

Abstract

The role of language and translation in the production of the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice (and Court of First Instance) of the European Communities is a significant one. That multilingual jurisprudence consists mainly of collegiate judgments drafted by jurists in a language that is generally not their mother tongue; it also undergoes many permutations of translation into/out of up to 23 different languages and thus is necessarily shaped by the particular way in which the Court of Justice works and by the actors within it. This paper considers the role played by language in the institutional dynamics of the Court of Justice, focusing in particular on those whose job it is to translate the jurisprudence of that Court, the lawyer-linguists. Based on qualitative data largely obtained from empirical fieldwork research, the first part of the paper considers the role of the Court’s lawyer-linguists prior to the ‘mega-enlargement’ of the European Union in 2004; the second part of the paper focuses on the implications of enlargement within the Court of Justice and considers whether such enlargement requires the rethinking of existing problematics and the development of new ways of functioning for that institution.